having attended a breakdancing competition for the first time in my life yesterday, i thought i would have something interesting and enlightening to say about the subculture. turns out, i really don't, so you get to watch this clip instead.
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was wondering with the brother just now about whether or not paddle pop still exists, and where one might get it. i always remember the original paddle pop -- the psychedelic one -- as having a most improbable taste, as if it were from an alien planet. in any case, it appears that it's still all the rage in australia, and that ads for it are still being made (with the olde paddle pop music!), but that the rainbow ones are no longer in vogue:
The fact was that Victor Crabbe, after a mere six months in the Federation, had reached that position common among veteran expatriates - he saw that a white skin was an abnormality, and that the white man's ways were fundamentally eccentric. In the early days of the war he had been in an Emergency Hospital, a temporary establishment which had taken over a wing of a huge County Mental Hospital. Most of the patients suffered from General Paralysis of the Insane, but the spirocaete, before breaking down the brain completely, seemed to enjoy engendering perverse and useless talents in otherwise moronic minds. Thus, one dribbling patient was able to state the precise day of the week for any given date in history; no ratiocinative process was involved: the coin went in and the answer came out. Another was able to add up the most complicated list of figures in less time than a comptometer. Yet another found rare musical talent blossoming shortly before death; he made a swanlike end. The Europeans were rather like these lunatics. The syllogism had been the chancre, the distant fanfare of the disease, and out of it had come eventually the refrigerator and the hydrogen bomb, GPI. The Communists in the jungle subscribed, however remotely, to the Hellenistic tradition: an abstract desideratum and a dialectical technique. Yet the process of which he, Victor Crabbe, was a part, was an ineluctable process. His being here, in a brown country, sweltering in an alien classroom, was prefigured and ordained by history. For the end of the Western pattern was the conquest of time and space. But out of time and space came point-instants, and out of point-instants came a universe. So it was right that he stood here now, teaching the East about the Industrial Revolution. It was right that these boys too should bellow through loudspeakers, check bombloads, judge Shakespeare by the Aristotlean yardstick, hear five-point counterpoint and find it intelligible.
